You should be cautious however about this lateral adjustment. It is better to correct your tendency to jerk to either side than to make the pistol conform to your bad trigger pressing.
When giving instructions on learning to shoot in an early chapter, I took it for granted that the learner is using a pistol he is reliably informed shoots where the sights are pointed.
A beginner cannot know himself whether the fault is his or the pistol’s when he makes a bad shot, so he gets into a hopeless tangle when using a pistol wrongly sighted.
An expert after a shot or two to find how the pistol is sighted can make allowance for the error in the sights. I saw a man make a marvellous score with a double barrelled rifle. I said to him how well the barrels shot together and he answered, “I had to aim two inches higher and to the left with the left barrel than with the right barrel.” It was the man who was marvellous not the rifle.
When a man begins to become expert he knows when his “let off” has been correct and that, if the bullet goes wide in such a case, it is not his fault, but the fault of the pistol.
The modern single-shot pistol and automatic pistol are almost invariably very accurate, so if the bullet goes wrong when the pistol is “let off” correctly, it is the fault of the sights.
Shots wide to the right or left mean in each case that the sights are not adjusted centrally to the barrel.
The front sight, being a fixture, is very unlikely to be at fault, but the back sight may have got moved to one side.
The back sight has generally a scratch made from its base onto the barrel, and if this scratch does not coincide then the sight has shifted and it must be knocked into place.
When the back sight is central and the bullets do not group to either side of the mark, but where you aim, then fix the back sight permanently and immovable.